Was RFK a JFK Conspiracy Theorist?

For my book, which focused on the history of the Warren Commission, I found Robert Kennedy’s relationship with the commission to be deeply disturbing, since he insisted in public that he believed the commission’s report and accepted that Oswald acted alone—but said precisely the opposite to the people closest to him.

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What would he have wanted to hide from the commission? Many things, including his hands-on involvement in the war on Castro, possibly including CIA plots in which the spy agency recruited the Mafia to carry out Castro’s murder. The disclosure of the existence of the CIA-Mafia plots could have damaged, or even destroyed, Kennedy’s future political prospects since he had made his reputation, first on Capitol Hill and then at the Justice Department, as a Mob-buster.

Other commission staff members said that Willens had been in an awkward position on the staff, since he was serving as both a senior member of the commission’s staff—he was chief deputy to J. Lee Rankin, the commission’s general counsel—and as the panel’s representative to his ultimate boss back at the Justice Department: Bobby Kennedy. Previously released commission files show it was Willens who relayed the message to the commission that Kennedy wanted to be excused from testifying—a request that Warren accepted, apparently believing it would be unseemly to ask the grief-stricken Kennedy to answer questions about his brother’s death.

The Willens files, in addition to suggesting that Kennedy was paying closer attention to the investigation than was previously known, contain other revelations, including that the attorney general was the key intermediary in helping the commission set up a brief sworn interview with former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy. In a private memo to the attorney general in June 1964, Willens sought Robert Kennedy’s help in arranging a meeting to take sworn testimony from Jackie, suggesting that the attorney general had veto power over whether the former first lady would testify at all

“As I understand the situation, it is agreed that Mrs. Kennedy may be questioned at any place convenient to you and her and with only those persons present that you wish,” Willens wrote to the attorney general. “Everyone associated with the commission would prefer not to question Mrs. Kennedy regarding some of the events of last November 22,” but “we feel it is necessary for two reasons,” Willens wrote. “First, all the other persons directly involved have testified before the commission, and the commission has to do a complete job. Second, she may have particular recollections about the events which will help clarify some of the still unresolved questions.”

Attached to the memo was a list of dozens of proposed questions for the former first lady, including how many shots she had heard and how her husband had reacted to the first bullet that hit him. Ultimately, few of the detailed questions were asked when, later that month, Warren and Rankin, the general counsel, went to her home in Georgetown, with her brother-in-law in attendance. In her testimony, Jackie Kennedy recalled the events in Dallas of the day of the assassination, including some of the gruesome details of what went on in the president’s limousine when shots rang out in Dealey Plaza. The session, which was transcribed and appeared in an appendix to the commission’s final report, lasted just nine minutes.

Other files on Willens’ site offer new evidence of the Warren Commission’s hostility toward the FBI; inside the commission’s staff, the bureau was seen as hindering the investigation to hide its own blunders before the assassination.

The files include a draft letter to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover in which the commission effectively accused the bureau of trying to cover up evidence that documented the extent of the FBI’s surveillance of Oswald in the weeks before Kennedy’s murder. The February 1964 draft, which was ultimately not sent, possibly out of fear of the wrath of the powerful Hoover, said that Warren was “seriously disturbed by what appears to be a deliberate effort to conceal the facts from the commission.” The draft letter was prepared after the discovery by the commission’s staff that, in a typewritten account of the contents of one of Oswald’s notebooks, the FBI had omitted a key item that had appeared in Oswald’s handwriting in the notebook—the name, phone number and license plate number of an FBI agent who had him under surveillance in the weeks before the assassination. Commission staffers said in interviews for my book that they believed the FBI had omitted the information in hopes of hiding just how closely the FBI had been trailing Oswald in the fall of 1963.

“As you know the commission is charged with the responsibility of developing and reporting the complete facts relating to the assassination of President Kennedy,” according to the draft letter, which was being prepared for Rankin’s signature. “Up to this point in its activities, the commission had assumed that it would have the full cooperation of federal investigative agencies.” The draft said that “omissions of such vital information from your reports not only lend credibility to otherwise unsupported allegations” but “also cast doubt on the ability of the commission to fulfill the task assigned to it by President Johnson.”

The documents released by Willens may hint at what revelations are still to come about the workings of the commission and other secrets kept from the investigation. The National Archives has confirmed that more than 1,000 documents related to the president’s murder are still being withheld from public view, most of them at the request of the CIA. Under a 1992 law passed as a result of the furor over Oliver Stone’s conspiracy-laden film JFK, all of those documents must be released publicly by October 2017. Some historians and other scholars suspect the still-secret files must reveal the names of people still living who worked for American intelligence in the early 1960s and who might be in danger if that spy work was revealed.

Will the release of those last files end the dark suspicions of a conspiracy in President Kennedy’s death? Almost certainly not. If even Robert Kennedy was a conspiracy theorist, it is hard to see how millions of other Americans will ever be convinced to accept that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

Philip Shenon, a former Washington correspondent for the New York Times, is author, most recently, of A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination.